May 8, 2013

Issue 5

In selecting poems for Issue 5, and then rereading them, things suddenly began to feel like summer here in Portland, Maine. The region's only recently hit temperatures requesting T-shirts and maybe even shorts at times. This morning, on my drive to work, I felt the sun go in and out of the new shade of the budding trees surrounding Sebago Lake.

And there's a similar experience in reading, selecting, and editing poems for The New Poet. The process is the same, but each submission is a welcomed difference. And there's an excitement to emailing poets around the country, sharing a quick celebratory exchange, and welcoming something new to the world. Even for something as old as poetry, like the weather, there's ample opportunity to appreciate it in a renewed spirit.

Wait again this morning for the rain to stop. Realize for the first time there

is no waiting: all this quiet dark, the trees thick and black and wet, sky

beginning to gray with light, clouds torn and broken along the horizon.

Everything hums with the rain – maybe it knows more than any of us will

ever know, when to begin, how long to stay, where it all ends, when it’s

time to say goodbye. The lamp, the teakettle, the telephone wires dripping

with rain, humming. Where am I today given my memory of yesterday – this

is what they say. I can’t remember what he gave to me back then, nor what

he said to the dry fields, the turned dirt, the sweat soaked into his shirt as

he stood in front of the never ending rows of cane. Potatoes. Beets. Peaches

dropping from trees in soft thuds. Once, next to a white van, he wore a pith

helmet, without a shirt, cool with his smile. Simply there – my father – in

the summer sun, and the traffic behind him thrumming to places still

without words.

Fred Arroyo is the author of Western Avenue and Other Fictions (University of Arizona Press, 2012), as well as the novel The Region of Lost Names (2008). Named one of the Top Ten New Latino Authors to Watch (and Read) in 2009 by LatinoStories.com, Fred is a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission. He has published fiction, poetry, and essays various literary journals and the anthologies The Colors of Nature (Milkweed 2011) and Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing (2010). Fred lives in Vermillion, South Dakota, where he teaches fiction and creative nonfiction in the MA/PhD Program in Creative Writing, as well in the undergraduate program, at the University of South Dakota.

Salvatore Attardo

Munchausen By Proxy

I – Justine

You baked me Sacher-Torte

And I cursed you

Driving through Vienna

You didn’t hear me, anyway

Busy as you were

With one of your little deaths

You always were the best-dressed liar

And so the ladies in Silesia

Are still waiting for their poem

In the blue-green of the trees

I once bought you chocolates

Near the Grand Place

It was very cold and rainy

Your mirror turned up cracked

Prophetess pacing back and forth

Guarding the very words you cast to the wind

You sit at the bottom of the sea

Your words are white

And so I wish your sails

II – Severin

You don’t mind me

Don’t remember me

The glaucous sea, the storms, the cries

Which cannot quiet down

Whose waters churn silt from the bottom

– it is said There is no peace –

Not Cassandra – I am Tiresias

Blind, cursed to be a woman

Having seen the goddess naked

In the blue-green woods

Dreaming of snakes, in the other room

Where the dancers are

III – Palinurus

“tibi somnia tristia portans insonti”

Aen. V: 840

Once the trusted pilot

Of pious Aeneas

For the Gods I was drowned

So that the prophecy

Would come to pass:

The hero is washed ashore, alone

And grieves.

As I sank

In the blue-green sea

Darker and colder

I still remembered

The rudder I abandoned

Like a Venetian merchant

I bought back the dust you shook

From your sandals

I traded ashes for ashes

Bought back my soul on sale

I now drive by

In my Mercedes rental

Illogical sign of good fortunes

To my relatives

And you, poor Palinurus,

Are only a sign pointing

To the eponymous cape.

Salvatore Attardo’s poetry and translations have appeared in many magazines, including Mikrokosmos Journal, Mojo, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Limestone,and Jet Fuel Review. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, he is currently at work on a book titled Complex Manifolds and Other Riemann Surfaces: Love Poems.

George Bishop

Bald Point

You’re told over and over by the bayou

behind you this is where winter winters,

that your footprints are meaningless, going

nowhere. You hope for a shell of something

because every few feet you want to stop

and pull yourself up into some dark past,

relive the best parts. Finally a dead man-

o-war speaks, but it’s just you, you with

all the names nothing answers to, nothing

you can hear from the end of Bald Point.

George Bishop is the author of five chapbooks. His full length collection, Expecting Delays, was published by FutureCycle Press in January 2013. Recent work appears in New Plains Review, Naugatuck River Review,and Sakura Review. Forthcoming work will be featured in Cold Mountain Review. Bishop attended Rutgers University and now lives and writes in Saint Cloud, Florida.

All of Feldman’s riches dance atop an aluminum atom on the head of a pin, a pin which Feldman keeps safe deep in a pocket inside a pocket inside a pocket. There is a variety of riches. Some nights, & these were the most sublime & poignant of nights—the stars throbbing over town like doomed flies in a massive spiderweb—Pamela would catch Feldman counting his riches, staring down, down, down into the head of that pin, & Pamela would sob into a little cup of seawater. But when Feldman would pluck a tiny telescope (Feldman also owns a giant microscope—one of his many, many riches) from the head of that pin & look even deeper down, impossibly down, into his riches & grin, that’s when Pamela would smash the little cup of seawater against the wall, & her sobs would drown out even the terrible wails of the little clamoring villagers who even at this very hour are canoeing frantically into the little harbor—canoeing frantically in vain because the harbor is always being devastated by the tsunami of Pamela’s tears. This of course is myth. Feldman is a rich man. He uses his giant microscope to view the starry stars, throbbing & doomed & lovely.

After 13 years of hopelessly grading hopeless freshman composition essays, Mike Dockins now lives in a remote pocket of the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York where he digs drain-off ditches, grapples with an intractable and grumpy coal stove, bunks with a half-feral, fangless tabby, and worries about stumbling into a mama black bear because no one would hear him scream, except himself and the bear, and maybe the quadrillions of trembling pine cones, and as everyone knows, pine cones are cosmically attentive but don't give a shit about you. Mike holds all the advanced academic degrees that somebody would want, but he hasn't a clue how to successfully wield them. In this way he's like a Sumerian staring vapidly at an iPhone. His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Quarterly West, and in the 2007 edition of The Best American Poetry. His critically-acclaimed first book of poems, Slouching in the Path of a Comet (Sage Hill Press, 2007), after moving 850 copies, is anticipating a third print run. Mike is also probably Facebook-stalking you.

Kelly Fordon

The Victim’s Testimony

I’m stuck in this file cabinet.

Who wants to finger me?

My words are onion paper thin.

Easily crumpled, easily tossed.

In French class I say,

“S'il vous plaît ne faites pas ça.”

Shower me with holy water

and I cower like Beelzebub.

The first robe is always white

but the outer one changes

like his performance. It was purple

that day to remind us of our sins.

As if I could forget.

As if God could. The light

above my box is always red,

which means stop, a word

I use more than any other.

Kelly Fordon’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review (KRO), Rattle, Flashquake, The Windsor Review, The Montreal Review, The Cleveland Review, and various other journals. Her poetry chapbook, On the Street Where We Live, won the 2011 Standing Rock Chapbook Contest and was published in February. Her new poetry chapbook, Tell Me When It Starts to Hurt, was published by Kattywompus Press in April 2013. www.kellyfordon.com

Lora Keller

On Shawano Lake

I wrap an orange life

jacket around my shoulders

like a crusty stole.

You thread the loose canvas tie

through the two silver rings

at my waist

and tug it tight, twice.

It’s my turn,

my one time all year

to be alone with you.

Your sons are still asleep

and jealous.

Your other daughter is

afraid of worms.

Our Evinrude fractures

the quiet morning

and soon we stop

at the edge

of a lily pad acre.

We float and lure perch

from their liquid field.

I imagine a stroll

across the smooth green,

swaying carpet,

sunfish darting

beneath my navy blue Keds,

through their foggy jungle

of shimmying stems.

Your reel hums and clicks.

I flounder for the perfect question

that would open

you to me.

A loon cry echoes.

Water softly rubs

the aluminum dinghy.

You cast your line again.

The black lead weight

arcs through the dark,

dawn sky and steers

the sheer fishing line

to the pike’s cool,

still lair.

At your feet, a metal tackle box

sparkles with your arsenal –

minnows, spinners, spoons.

I wait for a splash of golden tail,

any glance from you,

even a call to pull anchor.

Your cigar seasons the lake air.

I watch the bobber

at the end

of my bamboo pole –

the red half submerged,

the white half lifted,

alert

to all nibbles.

When she wasn’t fishing with her dad, Lora Keller pounded out poems on her toy typewriter in Kaukauna, Wisconsin. After working as a scriptwriter and public relations executive in New York City and Kansas City, she settled in Milwaukee where she now runs three small businesses. Her work has been published in Blast Furnace, Lantern Journal, Writer’s Haven, The Shepherd Express,and the Appleton Post-Crescent.

Kate LaDew

his heart thumped under the skin hard enough to leave marks

a tiny bomb, the size of a fist, denting bones with each tick

he knew, knew like he believed anything true, she heard

he wants to take it back, but her eyes freeze him dead,

empty, opaque, a statue of a saint

words lying in the air, so new they smelled like fresh paint

he wishes he were another person,

for a ‘you know what I meant’ button, equipped to every mouth

tonguing it like a caught popcorn kernel, he’d rub it raw, blood thick and warm in his throat

but all he can do is put a hand over the ticking bomb in his chest,

hoping if he smiled his red smile she would know he only meant the best

Kate LaDew is a graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Studio Art. She resides in Graham, North Carolina, with her cat, Charlie Chaplin.

Brian McKenna

The Salmon,

in a deep hole

of broiler light,

blackens. Buttered,

peppered, lemoned

to taste, the glowing

fillet, red-orange as

an exit sign, snaps

and hisses, ready

to be fished from

the heat, released

into the black

river of the senses

to dart off, through

smoke and wine.

Brian McKenna is currently pursuing an MA in the Creative Writing Program at Central Michigan University and working on his debut collection of poetry, Black River. He is a former poetry editor of CMU’s literary journal, Temenos.

Marina Pruna Moré

The Imagined Life

Everything, but the brick-colored couch,

which was purchased because it fit

the corner like a tailored wedding dress,

copper studded fists,

arms in rigid right angles

and wooden pegs like anchors –

everything else was gathered,

borrowed and pinched,

picked for the temporary morrow,

to be dispensed with

clean and fast,

like untying a bow.

Marina Pruna Moré is originally from Argentinean Patagonia, but now has roots in Miami, Florida. A recent graduate of Florida International University’s MFA program, her work has appeared in Flatmancrooked’s Slim Volume of Contemporary Poetics and Hinchas de Poesia. She spends her time figuring out how to divide her time between writing, co-editing forSliver of Stone Magazine, and enjoying the zoo that is her pet-filled home. Her long-time boyfriend, Steve, is patient.